Pivots, those shifts in direction in pursuit of a vision, are part of life for any business. We look at why businesses pivot and talk to the team at women-first dating app Bumble about their recent work to evolve the app's user experience.
Eira is an editor for Mind the Product. She's been a business journalist, editor, and copywriter for longer than she cares to think about. It could be a complete overhaul of pricing or a slight change in focus on a particular customer segment. His nomenclature is pretty self-explanatory: zoom-in pivot, zoom-out pivot, customer segment pivot, customer need pivot, platform pivot, business architecture pivot, value capture pivot, engine of growth pivot, channel pivot and technology pivot.
In fact, businesses, and startups in particular, pivot all the time. Some are more famous for their pivots than others - Netflix is particularly celebrated for its ability to shift direction and is often called the king of the pivot. What about other successful pivots? There are many to choose from. For example, Android started as a cloud-based photo storage platform, Groupon started out as a consumer activist site, Slack was originally formed to create a collaborative online game called Glitch, PayPal began as a utility to beam IOUs between Palm Pilots.
How, then, do you approach a pivot? We thought it might be helpful to look in more detail at a company that is evolving its strategy while staying true to its mission.
First though, a bit of background. These are substantial publicly traded corporations. But these are tricky times for dating apps, and user dissatisfaction and fatigue is rife. The suit asserts that Match apps are addictive by design, that they violate consumer laws and that Match Group "employs recognised dopamine-manipulating product features to gamify the Platforms to transform users into gamblers locked in a search for psychological rewards that Match makes elusive on purpose.
